The metallic tang of the African drum will crackle and bite like village fires where tradition is passed down
Fool’s Glitter
“ Like a baby still-born
Like a beast with its horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.”[1]
---
Nestled in the pregnant ground
The ancestors tamed me.
Midwived by the Companies’ adventuresome greed
I mewled and seduced, fed fanciful needs
And then
Lionised, I nurtured organised terror
I roared out my unholy power
I took humanity
and shoved it down my hole.
Gold
Solhan’s choke hold
Diamonds
Kailahun violence
Cobalt
Goma’s child soldiers
I took insanity
Fed it gas so it would explode.
Like a bankrupt billionaire
Like a unicorn turned bear
I will tear all the values that came before me.
I take humanity
And shove
it down
my hole.
Dedicated to the victims of the June 2021 Solhan massacre.
[1] From Bird on the Wire by Leonard Cohen
About the poet: Yarri Kamara is a Sierra Leonean writer living in Burkina Faso.
His Silence
Too much has happened here
He has waged silent warfare
Socially learned neglect as norm.
Avoided glances and eye contact.
Shut doors and cellphone for finger tips.
His attention, his smiles, his affection-
reserved for those who do not make him feel ashamed of his own existence.
His conversation, his loving touch
for those who validate his struggle to climb to the respect table
where I should be but could never attempt/ing to reach.
Too much has happened here
He has left the smell of polite smiles at my efforts to be worthy of acknowledgement.
He has eaten in putrid quiet that reeks of anger at his childhood, while she has scrambled around looking for her way out in festive dishes and perfectly set tables.
I hear his fear in the hallways muffled by her regret and suicide attempts.
She has mopped over them with parent-teacher meetings, over investment in our lives or over loving everyone and the attached parts of herself.
Too much has happened here
We have fought over clothes and accessories
We have competed for titles that nobody told us were birthrights
We have placed the judgment of our worth in him, her and the institutions that massacred him and her - left them in present bodies, drowning in wells of broken down barely breathing unsure souls.
Too much has happened here
I left.
I have identified, then co-identified to find I mis-identified for the books to tell me not to identify at all.
I have nightmares of the boy I let touch me
Strum his curious tunes across the keys of my skin
To unlock his unreadiness and flee from too muchness.
I have nightmares of the love I felt for him and the disdain he felt of me.
His was always a lock I picked apart while the mirror in the keyhole made him cringe with memories of too much happening in his mother’s home.
He has replied emails and love letters with one word answers while he questioned everything about hating how much he needed to love me.
Too much has happened here
We wake up in sweat in the middle of the night
Panting
We hear whispers of failure and gossip about how we did not win the competition for titles nobody told us were birthrights.
Nobody ever yelled love at us
Nobody ever shook respect into our hands with stretched out palm.
Nobody ever painted peace in green walls around us.
I do not want to be alone in this apartment.
Too much has happened here.
-By mw.
Featured
Ten Long Years
For ten long years
we spared no one
on the theater of war,
where no glories were won,
only the wasted lives of our kinfolks
and the tired frame
of a battered nation,
where we were prey and predator.
From humble Bomaru,
agony rode through our veins
to the death of heroes and villains,
when blood relatives of this land
hunted one another
with apocalyptic grudge,
fighting to conquer themselves
in a land divided against itself.
We had forgotten the peace
once shared in the noise children made
when they played hide and seek
on nights illuminated by moonlight,
when adults sat around the fire
sharing legends of their land
and the illustrious heroes
whose bold steps cleared our path.
We had strayed too far
from the luminance of Naimbana
and the bravery of Sengbe and Nyangua
to where we became lab animals
in the murderous hands of intoxicated children
controlled by savage hands,
possessed by evil spirits
conjuring our bloody end.
When our neighbors
in green and blue helmets
arrived to keep the peace
our fire had burned too far.
Those with any life left
rose from cinder
like feverish zombies
groaning and trembling to life.
Now let our ruin be our rebirth
as life itself springs from death,
a new country consecrated with blood
germinates with zest and courage,
with a firm commitment
to never again
turn to violence
to settle scores.
-Joseph Kaifala.
Joseph Kaifala is a lawyer , scholar and human rights activist from Sierra Leone.
Featured
In The Sun
a good poem to me is like food when I'm starving
you're poetry
a book battered and burnt
but still legible
i read you
your skin is fragile parchment full of stories of your past
the tattoos on your neck are new
a rose choked by its own thorns
a dead man hanging from a noose
i read you
black boy i can't love. black boy i can't have. black boy i can't call mine.
i found your book buried in the ashes of an old fireplace inside a haunted castle
i brought you home with me into the light where you don't need to hide
behind tattoos, behind thorns, behind costumes of monsters
like you, i used to be starving too
but you,
battered, burnt, blue black boy
fill me
i read you all summer long
right here
right here in the sun.
Adeola Carew is a writer and poet from Sierra Leone.